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My latest issue of Forbes has three editorials that I recommend reading:

1. A column that I cannot yet find on Forbes.com entitled, Economic Growth is Easy. Here’s a snippet:

John Stuart Mill long ago observed that we trade “products for products,” so if the desire is for increased consumption, we must stimulate the supply side of the economy. Specifically, we must remove the tax, regulatory, trade and monetary barriers to productivity. For individuals to consume, they must first produce.

Most people don’t understand that, which is one reason we keep electing fools. Consumption does not drive wealth. Investing to take a chance of realizing benefits do.

2. Another from British historian, Paul Johnson, Men Blinded by Their Brains. In it he writes how intellectuals seem to have an affinity for the powerful and evil. In the print version, this appears immediately after the subtitle, Moral Blind Spot:

Of course, intellectuals, whom I define as those who think ideas are more important than people, are notoriously bad at seeing the ordinary world and coming to moral decisions about it.

This article struck me because I’ve known such men. They could reason their way into very bad things and reason their way out of feeling any remorse or accountability for their actions.

Linking the value of money to gold removes a huge source of Big Government’s power. No longer can government confiscate wealth by stealth by devaluing your money. Economists hate the gold standard because they think they’re being deprived of one of their magic wands to shape the economy.

Big Government looks after its own interests. Left to its own devices it will relentlessly expand, crushing the private sector. That’s what’s happening in Europe today. Despite all the talk of austerity, the public sector has hardly been touched, while businesses and individuals have been hit with more and more taxes.

Despite thousands of years of experience to the contrary, central bankers and countless policymakers and economists believe that money manipulation can stimulate and wisely guide an economy.

It’s a destructive delusion. The world today would be an immensely richer place were it not for these hubristic notions that a handful of people can keep an economy rolling smoothly with minimal unemployment.